Article On Shill Baseball Collectibles On Ebay.

Food for thought:
This is pervasive across many venues and collectibles. Good to see ebay taking action finally.

https://www.actionnetwork.com/news/...g-pwcc?amp=1

Probably had a lot to do with ebay's proactiveness.

They pay no listing fee and a 1% final fee as of last year.

The interesting statement here IMHO is "Today's unilateral action by ebay simply hastens PWCC's move to the new platform" The more restrictions ebay puts (and cuts into profits), the more the pro dealers are just going to jump ship and build their own platforms. This is not 2001 where an internet auction is something novel but now anybody can just pop up their own auction house no need to go through ebay. This could be beginning of future where pro dealers abandon ebay and it goes back to its ebay garage sale roots which definitely isn't a good thing for ebay, as they have been trying to crack into more prestigious, higher end collectible markets for years and years.

I wonder what would happen to our hobby if hackers shut down ebay for a few days. I wonder if that would cause some folks to revisit how they feel about ebay?

If we could wave a wand and transfer all of the philatelic listings and traffic to another platform, is the thinking that the other platform would not quickly begin to cash in by 'updating' their terms and conditions? Does anyone think that the new platform would have a similar infrastructure which has the ability to index a new listing instantaneously the way that ebay does now? Does anyone feel that the other platform would not have the same issues that ebay does now if they had the same worldwide marketing reach?

In my opinion it has probably been the single greatest positive impact for our hobby in my lifetime. Trying to disposition my extra material before ebay was far more difficult and I think that finding specific material was more difficult.

Does ebay have issues? Of course, they suck in many ways but in balance I think they have been a good thing for philately.
Don

I fully agree with Don. ebay has had a major impact on the stamp hobby..
Before the year 2000, many stamps I collected like Thailand revenues were extremely rare and nearly impossible to find for any price!
After the year 2000 when ebay became more popular it was suddenly possible to buy for quite low prices single stamps missing from sets or other lower value stamps. No auction house sells 1 dollar stamps in auction, that means you had to buy box lots or larger country collections, resulting in huge amounts of excess stamps.
Lots of long dormant material could find its way into the market via ebay.

Yes, ebay makes a lot of irritating changes like the global shipping program (irritating at least for me living in Thailand and being asked to pay $47 shipping on a $1 value stamp). But like every new rules in the world, we can try to live with it or find ways o mitigate the impact.
As a seller of stamps, ebay is the only auction site with enough bidders to make it possible to list auction style lots all starting at $.99 and still get good final selling results.
Hipstamps and Delcampe are only suitable for fixed price auctions due to lower amount of bidders.

So all in all, ebay is a great contributor for our hobby.

If PWCC is the ebay seller's ID, it has no active listing and no completed listing history following an advanced search by seller as of 10 minutes ago.

"pwcc_auctions" is the correct ID I see from redwoodrandy. Thanks, it helps to have the correct seller's ID to go ponder and stew.